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As Jinniver went back towards the inn she heard another hobbit loudly hailing Mr Proudfoot, and she stopped briefly to see if he had heard. Sure enough, Egbert Proudfoot came quickly back up the road huffing and puffing, his face even more red; he was shouting about how he was in a rush but seemed more than willing to be sidetracked by an old acquaintance all the same.
The stable master was with the hobbit who had hailed Mr Proudfoot, and he looked back over his shoulder at Jinniver, saying something to the other hobbit. Jinniver’s face flushed a little, but instead of hurrying away, wondering why anyone she didn’t know would possibly want to acknowledge her, as she might normally have done, she raised her hand in greeting. “Nice day, isn’t it?” she said. It was something she might have said to one of the Breelanders she knew well, but she would certainly not have been so familiar with a stranger just a couple of days ago.
Since she had arrived at the Green Dragon on the previous evening, she had met several strangers, and she was beginning to feel less nervous and clumsy, and more like her old self. Back before the dark days of the trouble, when all those men came up the Greenway and she had to learn to grow up fast. Her father had told her she had to stop pottering around her mother's farmhouse singing and dreaming, and instead had to learn about keeping quiet and locking the doors at night. Then there had been the time when they had had to flee into Bree itself, but that was the part of the story she didn't want to think about. When they came back to the ruins of the farm she was grown up and she had immersed herself in her work. And it had been that way ever since until now.
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